The next evening organized in cooperation with Diffractions Lecture Series this time about Dark ecology with lectures by the artist Paula Chaney and Ivan Sebalo.
Sustainable necessities and darker ecologies
In this presentation artist Paul Chaney will describe his research located at FIELDCLUB – a small agricultural site in Cornwall, UK. Here Chaney lived off-grid in a hand built cabin between 2004 and 2012 while undertaking his own food production and relying on minimal outside resources. During this durational experiment Chaney devised speculative methodologies for quantification, analysis, and design; using his practice as a tool to interrogate the artistic genre of the site specific and the relations between an individual human, a limited site, and the site’s non-human inhabitants. The experiment grew into an exploration of dark ecologies through praxis and tried to consider the ironies and ethical complexities embodied within a post modern attempt to ‘get back to nature’, while revealing wider implications for the paradigms of human endeavour, technological progress, and sustainability.
Chaney will also present elements of his more recent work Lizard Exit Plan – a comprehensive scheme for the population of the Lizard Peninsular in Cornwall to exit the economy of global capital through the necessity of an unspecified apocalyptic event. The project proposes a locally distinct system for low-impact food production and generated designs for low-impact architectures. The work also included the development of tools for measuring the base coefficient of human labour, and began to readdress the tyranny of the physical body within the proposed conditions of a low-tech sustainable agriculture.
The Psychology of Ecological Crisis - Ivan Sebalo
Independently from its names: global warming, new ice age or maybe even the 'wrath of God,' an environmental crisis is at hand. The majority of independent research brings forth alarming results. However, humanity as a whole appears neither troubled by such news nor ready to take any meaningful preventive measures. As any other science, psychology offers several insights into the nature of this problem. In the case of their attitude towards climate change people tend to engage either in denial or in a reaction formation. Since both of these are defence mechanisms, psychoanalysis, and subsequent research proposes to view them as a result of overwhelming anxiety which itself accumulates due to it's inability to accept responsibility. As for the former, the absence of a proper reaction can be understood through the lenses of several theories. The Commoners dilemma, the failure of biological risk thermostat, egocentrism, the oceanic feeling of "progress" and integration of material goods into the construction of self identity - all of them were found to be among the underlying causes for the apathy. Now, as these attitudes and behaviours are beginning to be comprehended, a new question arises: how can they be changed?
Paul Chaney (*1974) is a self-taught artist and sometimes horticulturalist whose work is articulated through a mix of installation, participatory and durational art practices. In 2009/2010 he worked with the philosophy publisher Urbanomic to develop guided tours exploring a theory of geo-trauma in the 19th century mining landscape of Cornwall. More recently he has been investigating paradigms of industrial growth and the agency of geological materials while on residency with Divus (Prague, Czech Republic) and Izolyatsia (Donetsk, Ukraine). He has worked with Tate St Ives, Serpentine Gallery, and The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW). In 2015 he was awarded the Arts Foundation runner up prize, and nominated for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Prize.
Ivan Sebalo is an independent researcher, student, and lecturer, finishing his degree from psychology at University of New York in Prague.
